Archive for 2026 week 1
- Gvazda: physical description - 29 Dec 2025
- Intrasystem travel - 30 Dec 2025
- Close-up on 1519 - 31 Dec 2025
- Gvazda: society - 01 Jan 2026
- Political boundaries in The Ring - 02 Jan 2026
- Zhdez vs Inukari - 03 Jan 2026
- Zhdez vs Terran - 04 Jan 2026
Gvazda, or Wolves, or Wargs, or a number of less-complimentary names, are canine-descended (or rather, canine-uplifted) sophonts. Compared to their ancestors, they have a short muzzle and round head with larger brain. They stand upright, but are digitigrade, meaning they stand on their "toes" and giving them both an ankle and knee joint in their legs.
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
Melodite 1519 has an unusual mainworld: a water world, rare in the apparently-curated worlds accessible from brightspace. It also has an unusual asteroid belt: the outer belt is formed from the remains of a rocky planet, apparently destroyed by the Precursors.
The Zhdez were the first to encounter Gvazda, and found them almost incomprehensibly alien. The highly cooperative Zhdez were baffled by Gvazdan competitiveness and hierarchy.
I've been trying to figure out the timeline of Ring settlement, and the political dynamics between different branches of humanity based on what I've decided about their differences. The problem is, I don't see the Zhdezi as capable of enforcing their boundaries as I initially thought: if Inukari immigration outpaced the Zhdez ability to assimilate via coercive telepathy, the Zhdez will just withdraw. They don't have the population pressure forcing them to spread out, nor the desire for conquest of planets they don't really need.
The Zhdez encountered the Inukari first, and it was a fairly peaceful meeting (albeit very confusing, since both sides assumed their homeworld was the only source of humanity). The Inukari didn't mean to push the Zhdez out of the Ring, they are just very enthusiastic and capitalistic and pushy. The cultural conflict has mostly been: Zhdez simply give stuff away, assuming that it'll be reciprocated because why wouldn't it be? And the Inukari can't help but take advantage of that. And the result was very tragedy-of-the-commons.
The Terrans are Toxic Masculinity: The Species, so clearly they think of the Zhdez as effeminate (they don't think of Zhdez non-men at all), and regard psionic powers as sneaky, underhanded foreign ways. Where the Zhdez are just regretfully leaving the upper Ring, they're being forcibly pushed out by the Terrans, and have ended up in some actual shooting wars, mostly so they can hold the Terrans off long enough to pack up their valuables and leave. The Terrans, on the other hand, are trying to seize Zhdez factories (citing unpaid debts and taxes that the Zhdez did not agree to), which is the only thing keeping them from bombing everything.